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“What is good art?” is a standard philosophical quandary that never really goes very far as long as there’s a relativist in the room (and there usually is). With art more than most things it’s harder to argue that its goodness isn’t in the eye of the beholder. A better question is “What is required to make good art?” And that, I argue, is at least two things: authenticity and anonymity.

A good artist is authentic. We need not argue exactly what “authentic” means to proceed; just to agree what it’s not. It’s not pandering to the masses. It’s not for increasing social status. It’s not from desiring praise. If it happens to be for anybody at all, it’s incidental to the artist’s need to express. And if it’s to be judged, an artist should prefer it be on its own merit. And that’s where anonymity comes in.

Artists should be anonymous not simply because it doesn’t matter who the artist is (with some exceptions), but because it enables authenticity in both the artist and the audience. The anonymous artist is free to express without their identity being tied to success or failure, and they cannot doubt their own intentions.

Let’s take for granted that good art, beyond mere technical skill, is an expression of the artist’s soul. It relates to some part heretofore unknown to ourselves, or gets us thinking about something familiar in a new way. Whether or not it is understood depends on the experiences the artist/audience has had in their lives (in this way they are equals – an artist is not to be revered). It’ll either be gotten or not – and not everyone will get it because not everyone will get the artist, and that’s ok. But for the artist who has made themselves one with their art for public consumption and judgement, the failure of the art to connect is internalized and externalized as a failure of the artist. This giving-of-fucks is like poison and will lead the artist down a path of angst and dissatisfaction, not to mention bad art.

Another reason artists should remain anonymous is to reduce the amount of career artists who are making art for the wrong reasons. Artists need to have an existence that is not primarily about making art for the sake of it. If someone is locked in a contract or becomes too focused on maintaining their brand or income stream, then they cease to be authentic, and if they are creating at the expense of living, then they cease to be relatable. Art should be the byproduct of experience; an experience of life as we know it – through the artist’s eyes. Their gift to us.

But anonymity is really more for the benefit of the audience than the artist. The general audience is so impressionable that if they see, hear, or read something unfamiliar, they naturally look to other markers for how to react. The artists preexisting works, reputation, or other such subconscious biases might influence their perception of the art. When J.K. Rowling released her adult crime/fiction novel under the pseudonym “Robert Galbraith”, she was hoping to bring the focus back to the work; to, as she says, “work without hype or expectation and receive totally unvarnished feedback.” As a result, the book was read and reviewed, came and went, entirely on its own merit.

We must not conflate the art with the artist. We must focus our attention on the art itself and judge it according to our own aesthetic sensibilities – which we must continually develop by seeking art out where it’s hiding or being overshadowed; choosing what to be exposed to rather than passively letting ourselves be exposed to whatever is front and center. As many of us know, that’s not where the best art is.

Popularity is the enemy of our and society’s aesthetic development. The more popular an artist becomes the more their name is spread around and passed down without people actually coming into direct contact with the work but feeling like they know its quality already, the more automatic exposure they will get before even producing, and the more people will be tricked into thinking that good art necessarily comes from popular artists.

With artists as anonymous, each work of art will be judged with no other reference point but itself, and the art that survives will be the art that deserves to.

Humanist Perspectives

Nietzsche

Fallacies

John Dominic Crossan

“Just because the Bible says “Jesus is the Lamb of God,” it doesn’t follow that Mary had a little lamb.”

Richard Dawkins: Unweaving the Rainbow

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats. scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumber the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Words to live by – Douwe Stuurman

what you will love mostis to walkon the earth

Story

Grow a Soul

“One of the attractions of the UU approach to religion and life is caught in the assertion that divinity and spirit are to be found not through blind faith but through finding and sending down roots to the deepest part of one’s unique self. As is true in botany, those roots spread out into the wider community and can nourish us and give us a healthy life. How do we know when we are living in the best place for those roots to grow? In so much as we do indeed “grow a soul” we should consider carefully the garden in which that soul grows.” - Bob Lane

Albert Camus

“For a generous psychology.

We help a person more by giving him a favorable image of himself than by constantly reminding him of his shortcomings. Each individual normally strives to resemble his best image. Can be applied to teaching, to history, to philosophy, to politics. We are for instance the result of twenty centuries of Christian imagery. For two thousand years man has been offered a humiliating image of himself. The result is obvious. Anyway, who can say what we should be if those twenty centuries had clung to the ancient ideal with its beautiful human face.” Albert Camus — Notebooks

Bertrand Russell

When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts.

The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way. And if we are to live together and not die together, we should learn the kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

Julius Caesar Lecture

Religion

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion. -Albert Einstein

Bible Lecture

Reading the Bible FREE

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On Existence

Dad?

Pindar

“O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life,

but exhaust the limits of the possible”.

Archives

Archives

Philosophy on Facebook

Samuel Beckett – words

“You must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
(Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, 1959, p.418)